As far as I’m concerned, it’s a “no brainer” for AAPI advocates to support data disaggregation. Previous efforts to disaggregate AAPI demographic data — including, most notably, successful efforts to disaggregate Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in Census data as a separate racial category — have yielded a plethora of valuable data concerning these communities. Activists have subsequently mobilized to develop programs specifically focused on the NH/PI community. For a community long damaged by our invisibility, AAPI must agree: efforts to improve data collection around the AAPI community are a good thing.

So, how can one possibly oppose The AHEAD Act?

AB1726 enjoys strong bipartisan support from both within and outside the AAPI community: it is co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF), the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) and Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC), and is further backed by 112 California-area organizations, most of them AAPI-focused. Yet, a number of Chinese Americans lead by State Senator Bob Huff of California’s 29th District, have become increasingly vocal — and vitriolic — in their opposition to The AHEAD Act.

Throughout the late 1800’s, Asian immigration constituted predominantly people of Chinese nationality, as well as immigrants from Japan, Korea, India, and the Philippines. All of these early Asian immigrants entered into a racialized America where race existed primarily along a black-white binary. Thus, prior to 1870, Asian immigrants occupied an uncertain racial space, legally and politically “Colored” (an official classification that ensured the denial of basic legal rights) while demographically lumped in with Whites in early Census reports. Faced with the overt illogic of their simplistic racial taxonomy, the Census experimented through the late 1800’s with myriad ways to count America’s Asians — a process that was not only confusing to its Asian respondents but which also raises fundamental questions of what constitutes race in America. For example, in 1870, when the Census first included a box for “Chinese”, they noted that this group included immigrants from Japan. Just a few decades later, Japanese people had a separate box in the Census.

The Census’ efforts to reorganize its collection of demographic data to count Asian immigrants as separate from White reflected the country’s overall recognition that Asians were already understood to be “Colored.” Asians at this time were explicitly unable to vote, to naturalize as American citizens, or to testify in a court of law. But, Huff is incorrect to suggest that Chinese Exclusion and other anti-Chinese laws passed during this same time only occurred after the federal government had begun to count — and therefore recognize — America’s growing Chinese population.

Huff forgets that America’s anti-Asian racists needed no Census numbers to fuel their racism; anti-Chinese laws were being passed in the state of California in the 1850’s, long before the Census first recognized Asians (or Chinese) as a distinct group. Anti-Asian sentiment might have influenced 19th century efforts to disaggregate Asians from Whites in the Census, but it would be illogical and ahistorical to say that the Census’ disaggregation of Asian from White, itself, caused the anti-Asian sentiment that eventually resulted in Chinese Exclusion or Japanese American incarceration.

Two centuries ago, Americans disaggregated Asians from Whites to underscore the perpetual foreigner status of Asian immigrants — a status that was already officially codified in American law. Today, the opposite is true: The AHEAD Act seeks to improve access for — not to disenfranchise — our country’s underserved Asian communities. That distinction matters. The AHEAD Act is an important civil rights bill for AAPIs.

Sadly, mainstream media ignores The AHEAD Act’s backing by hundreds of AAPI groups to focus their narrative on the few AAPIs who oppose the bill. According to their own Committee testimony, these opponents fear that data disaggregation is a “backdoor” to passage of affirmative action. If so, they tie themselves into an unusual rhetorical knot: to argue that if one believes that The AHEAD Act will boost support for affirmative action, one must also believe that the bill’s disaggregation of California’s higher education data will yield an inconvenient result. What could they be afraid we will see in a disaggregated dataset, I wonder?

Opponents of The AHEAD Act demand that the AAPI community embrace invisibility. They suggest that more data about AAPIs is wrong; worse yet, that to better understood the nuances of our community is dangerous. Yet, racism doesn’t emerge from knowledge — it is ignorance that breeds hatred.

We need data disaggregation, if for no other reason than because we should be suspicious of the motives of someone like Huff who would presume to lecture an organization like JACL about the discrimination against AAPIs that led to their own founding. Bob Huff needs to sit all kinds of down.